The Plot: Melanie Crowder's verse novel
Audacity (2015) explores the adolescent years of real-life activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson, who is best known for her role as an executive board member of The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and her impromptu speech in the Great Hall at Cooper Union which helped incite a strike called "The Revolt of the Girls" in the garment industry in New York City's Lower East Side in the early 1900s. The narrative begins with Clara describing her experiences living on the outskirts of a small shtetl in the Russian Empire. Her mother runs a small grocery store and her father is an orthodox scholar who spends his days studying the Torah and praying. Clara's religious parents do not approve of schooling for girls, and in protest of the anti-Semitism in the region, her father forbids her to read or write in the Russian language. Despite their disapproval, Clara advances her education by secretly trading singing lessons for books (which her father burns when he finds them in her room). After a pogrom in which almost fifty people in her shtetl are murdered, Clara's family immigrates to the US. The first half of the verse novel focuses on Clara's life in the shtetl and her journey to New York, and the second half follows her experiences working in garment shops and her work with the ILGWU. Appalled by the terrible and dangerous working conditions (low wages, 70 hour work weeks, restricted bathroom breaks and access to drinking water, sexual harassment from the foreman, and no fire escapes), Clara helps form her local union. In spite of being repeatedly fired, harassed, beaten, and jailed for her participation in the union and worker strikes, Clara continues her activism, and she even gives up a scholarship to go to medical school in order to keep fighting for justice.
The Poetry: Crowder, who received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, divides her verse novel into five dated sections: "tinder 1903," "spark 1904-1905," "flame 1905-1907," "fire 1908," and "blaze 1909." Crowder utilizes one to three page free verse poems that are composed in short lines and often play with both right and left justification in order to note a shift from lyrical or narrative description to the speaker's inner monologue. For example, the lead-off poem in the collection, "clouds," begins with Clara working to memorize a poem "Song of the Storm Petrel" by Russian writer Maksim Gorky, a founder of the socialist realism literary movement:
Words
float like wayward clouds
in the air
in my mind.
Now his wing the wave
Wait--
or was it,
Now the wave his wing caresses
I dip a hand
into my apron pocket
unfold a square of paper
against my palm (3).
Poems utilizing this shift from image to thought, from external to internal are scattered across the collection. Crowder also repeatedly uses bird imagery throughout the verse novel to serve as a metaphor for Clara's desire for voice and freedom.
The Page: Like many other historical verse novels including Jacqueline Woodson's
Brown Girl Dreaming and Margarita Engle's
Enchanted Air, Crowder frames her poetry with a variety of paratextual materials including an author's note, an epigraph from Clara Lemlich, an eight page historical note with photographs, an interview with Clara's daughters and grandchildren, a glossary of terms, and a bibliography of sources. As with Padma Venkatraman's
A Time to Dance, Crowder employs the blank space on each page adeptly.
Crowder's narrative and use of imagery were strong, and although this book is near 400 pages, it never became tiresome. I give
Audacity four stars.
